“Miss Cooper: Loneliness is a terrible thing don't you agree?

Anne: Yes, I do agree. A terrible thing ….

Miss Meacham: She's not an ‘alone’ type.

Miss Cooper: Is any type an ‘alone’ type, Miss Meacham … ?”

(From Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, (1955, 78, 92)

In Separate Tables, the hit of the 1955 New York theatrical season, the Irish playwright, Terence Rattigan, used the metaphor of solitary diners in a second-rate residential hotel in Cornwall to convey the loneliness of the human condition. It may be a bit far fetched to use this metaphor to describe the condition of political science in the 1980s. But in some sense the various schools and sects of political science now sit at separate tables, each with its own conception of proper political science, but each protecting some secret island of vulnerability.

It was not always so. If we recall the state of the profession a quarter of a century ago, let us say in the early 1960s, David Easton's (1953) and David Truman's (1955) scoldings of the profession for its backwardness among the social science disciplines, had been taken to heart by a substantial and productive cadre of young political scientists. In 1961 Robert Dahl wrote his Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest reflecting the sure confidence of a successful movement, whose leaders were rapidly becoming the most visible figures in the profession. Neither Dahl nor Heinz Eulau, whose Behavioral Persuasion appeared in 1963 made exaggerated or exclusive claims for the new political science.

There is probably no subject which has been studied more thoroughly by political scientists than American presidential elections. A vast literature has developed examining the effects of attitudes toward the parties, candidates, and issues on voter decision-making in these quadrennial contests (for a comprehensive review of this literature see Asher, 1988). Despite the proliferation of literature on this topic, however, relatively little research has addressed what is perhaps the most basic question about presidential elections: who wins and who loses?

A few scholars have developed models for predicting the national outcomes of presidential elections. Brody and Sigelman (1983) proposed a model based on the incumbent president's approval rating in the final Gallup Poll before the election. This extremely simple model yielded an unadjusted R2 of .71. Hibbs (1982) proposed a different bivariate model based entirely on the trend in real per capita disposable income since the last presidential election. This model yielded an unadjusted R2 of .63. Thus, neither of these bivariate models proved to be highly accurate.

Lewis-Beck and Rice (1984) have developed a forecasting model which combines economic conditions and presidential popularity, Their model, which uses the president's approval rating in May and the change in real per capita GNP during the second quarter of the election year to predict the popular vote for president, yields an unadjusted R2 of .82.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 1988 presidential nominating politics was a gold mine for editorial cartoonists. Exaggeration and distortion are the cartoonist's stock-in-trade, Colin Seymour-Ure (1986, 168) tells us, and—with Gary Hart's dalliance, Joseph Biden's plagiarism, Pat Robertson's direct line to God, Robert Dole's tantrums, Jesse Jackson's ego, and George Bush's image problems—there was much to exaggerate and distort in the 1988 races.

Like other journalists, editorial cartoonists follow and interpret campaigns for the public. Like columnists, cartoonists openly praise or condemn candidates and campaigns. But the power of pictures sets cartoonists apart from other editorialists. According to Doug MaHette of the Atlanta Constitution, the fundamentals of cartooning are distortion, hyperbole, and subjectivity. Cartoons, he writes (1988, 158), “distort and reflect reality like fun-house mirrors.” Seymour-Ure (1986, 170) agrees: “The comments and insults conveyed by the graphic imagery of a cartoon have a crudity and offensiveness that might well be unacceptable if spelt out in words.”

As long as editorial cartoonists have caricatured politicians, politicians have feared for their public images. Thomas Nast helped topple Boss Tweed in the 1870s by repeatedly drawing him and his ring as corrupt. “Stop them damn pictures!” Tweed reportedly roared after an especially tough Nast cartoon appeared in 1871. Vice President Bush may have harbored similar resentment when he recently complained about Gary Trudeau's representations of him in “Doonesbury.” A particularly painful stab of the Trudeau pen was placing Bush's manhood in a blind trust.

How—and how well—does the modern process of vice presidential selection work? What can be learned by considering the nominations of Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen by the Democrats and Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana by the Republicans in 1988?

Most students and practitioners of American politics agree as a matter of principle that vice presidents should be chosen with their constitutional role as presidential successor uppermost in mind. Nine vice presidents, more than a fifth of those who have held the office, have succeeded to the presidency. (They served as president for forty-two years, twenty-nine of them in this century). During one recent period from 1945 to 1977, vice presidents who became president by succession occupied the Oval Office fully half the time. Illnesses, impeachment proceedings, and assassination attempts have made succession an active possibility during twenty of the nation's forty presidencies (Goldstein 1982, 207-08). Every postwar vice president except Walter F. Mondale has become the subject of unusual public concern because of some event or condition that raised the possibility that he would succeed to the presidency.

To the extent that the concern for presidential succession is taken seriously, it implies two governance criteria for evaluating the vice presidential selection process. The most important governance criterion is the competence of nominees for vice president to be president. Historically, six of the nine successions have occurred during the vice president's first year in office, suggesting that even the best on-the-job training is no substitute for a wise initial choice.

Congress is once again considering the possibility of enacting national voter registration reform. The Universal Voter Registration Act—introduced by Alan Cranston (D-CA) in the Senate and by John Conyers (D-MI) in the House—would require the states to establish both day-of-election registration and mail-in registration, and it would also require “all Federal agencies and all State, county, and municipal agencies receiving grant-in-aid monies” to offer voter registration to the public. Jesse Jackson has since taken up support of the bill, and Governor Dukakis, no champion of registration reform in his own state, acceded to Jackson's demand that it be endorsed by the Democratic party platform. And then there is a second bill being shaped by Representative Al Swift (D-WA) which would require states to make voter registration an automatic part of processing people for drivers' licenses and identification cards in motor vehicle offices. This bill may also be expanded to include other federally-assisted state agencies, such as unemployment and welfare.

Certainly something should be done. Just a shade more than half of Americans will go to the polls in November 1988, compared with turnout levels between 75% and 95% in other western democracies. High turnout is made easy elsewhere because citizens are placed on registration lists automatically when they come of age, or they are registered periodically by government-sponsored door-to-door canvasses. In the United States, by contrast, only 63% of those eligible are registered; more than 65 million are not, and two out of three of them are below the median income.

The activities of feminist and other women's organizations at the 1988 Democratic convention were driven by an over-riding desire to elect a Democratic administration in November. There was universal agreement that the Reagan years have been disastrous for women, and that four more years of Republican rule will, at the very least, result in a Supreme Court that will limit women's options for decades to come.

This goal more than anything else explains the relative quiescence of the 15 organizations' that formed Women's Central and held the usual women's caucus every day of the convention. Indeed when Ellie Smeal and Molly Yard, past and current Presidents of NOW, expressed some mild disaffection with the amount of attention feminist issues and representatives received from the Dukakis campaign, it was quickly countered with a press conference by heads of six Women's Central organizations to extol the fact that women were now insiders. And Kate Michelman, executive director of NARAL, lauded Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen's voting record on abortion even though he opposes federal funding.

The sense of unity and common purpose these women expressed was not artificial, because, to a greater extent than ever thought possible, when contemporary feminists first made demands at the 1972 convention, women were insiders. The Dukakis campaign emphasized that women held a large number of the top positions—including campaign manager Susan Estrich. Texas Treasurer Ann Richards, a member of the NWPC, was a bit hit as the keynote speaker.